Competency-based education (CBE) programs are growing in popularity as an alternative path to a postsecondary degree. Freed from the seat-time constraints of traditional higher education programs, CBE students can progress at their own pace and complete their postsecondary education having gained relevant and demonstrable skills. The CBE model has…

The challenge of funding a high quality higher education system, ensuring it has the capacity to help meet the increasing demand for high level skills in our economy and the aspirations of our students, has been an ongoing concern for successive Australian governments over many years. This paper reviews the findings and recommendations of…

The Rhode Island Education Policy Primer provides an overview of how public education operates in Rhode Island. The Introduction offers context on the inequitable origins of Rhode Island's public school system, as well as the role that activism has played in expanding educational opportunities. The At a Glance section provides a quick look at…

Although International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement-pioneered international large-scale assessment (ILSA) of education is now a well-established science, non-practitioners and many users often substantially misunderstand how large-scale assessments are conducted, what questions and challenges they are designed to…

This year's Action Guide examines the need for new ways of measuring student success. Academic test scores are just one method of measuring student progress, offering an incomplete picture of student learning and growth. Educators and state leaders recognize that serving all students well requires focusing on their individual needs, including…

The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) is one of the world's leading educational research centres. Since it was established in 1930, ACER has built a strong reputation as a provider of reliable support and expertise to education policymakers and professional practitioners. Each year, ACER is involved in a large number of research…

In 2002 the Council of the Great City Schools and its members set out to develop performance measures that could be used to improve business operations in urban public school districts. The Council launched the Performance Measurement and Benchmarking Project to achieve these objectives. The purposes of the project were to: (1) Establish a common…

Adult education's mission is a critical one. It seeks to provide the large and diverse population of adults who lack basic skills, a high school credential, or English language skills with the competencies they need to be productive workers, family members, and citizens. Federally funded adult education serves learners in three types of programs:…

For some four decades governments in Commonwealth Caribbean (CC) countries have been introducing interventions in their school systems to provide quality education for all. Examples of these are learner-centred teaching pedagogy and the integration of technology into teaching and learning. The data for the paper is based on published research and…

The Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning (C-SAIL) examines how college- and career-readiness (CCR) standards are implemented, whether they improve student learning, and what instructional tools measure and support their implementation. Established in July 2015 and funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S.…

Given medical education's longstanding emphasis on assessment, it seems prudent to evaluate whether our current research and development focus on testing makes sense. Since any intervention within medical education must ultimately be evaluated based upon its impact on student learning, this report seeks to provide a quantitative accounting of…

Over the past three decades, the number of developing countries participating in International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSAs) has increased dramatically, while developing countries' usage of data from ILSAs for informing educational policy has not been fully realised. In this paper the authors argue that for ILSAs to be useful policy tools,…

Teachers and school leaders have been pressed to use data over the last few decades, and that pressure is increasing. Yet while data use has become a popular term among educators and politicians, evidence demonstrates that teachers and school leaders still struggle with making sense of data in the service of improved learning outcomes. To do this…

Champions of students with disabilities have long complained that those students are often an afterthought in state testing plans. Only after a test design is completed are educators asked to go back and adapt the questions for a student who is blind, who needs help accessing text or calculating numbers, or who must use a specialized device to…

Intellectual engagement is an absorbing, creatively energized focus resulting in a deep personal commitment to exploration, investigation, problem-solving and inquiry over a sustained period of time. In this article, the authors argue that participatory learning environments with a focus on knowledge building offer clear learning benefits to…